In the construction industry, among many other industries, enterprises maintain large fleets of mobile equipment, which they deploy, employ, and redeploy throughout a series of geographically distributed worksites. The nature of a large fleet of mobile equipment creates a long series of problems, both obvious and subtle, that create adverse impact on the profitability of the fleet-owning enterprise.
From the perspective of maintaining a distributed fleet, obvious difficulties exist in terms of maintenance. The geographic distribution of equipment adds difficulty to a central motor pool's tracking of the simplest tasks, such as when an oil change is needed or when spark plugs need to be replaced. The prior art offers no good solution to these problems, other than sending a human being to collect and analyze data at great cost in terms of labor.
Additionally, the prior art offers no real way for a central office to determine the utilization of a distributed fleet. Owners of construction equipment that is distributed over a geographic area may know that three job sites need backhoes to complete excavations, but they have no sense of the number of hours per working day that an individual backhoe is utilized. Stated simply, when equipment is idle and the central routing facility does not know that the equipment is idle, capacity is wasted and potential profit is lost.
Further, various forms of theft are made easier by distributed fleets, and the prior art makes no allowance for preventing these thefts. The most obvious thefts, such as loading a backhoe onto a trailer and stealing the backhoe during the night, are difficult to catch without a distributed security force monitoring assets. A distributed security force represents, of course, a tremendously costly investment of labor. Smaller forms of theft, such as the same backhoe being “borrowed” by an employee to dig out a swimming pool on the weekend, cost the owner of the equipment a tremendous amount of money and are nearly impossible to effectively police with prior art methods.
Under the prior art, there is simply no cost-effective way to monitor, without tremendous investment of labor, the deployment and disposition of distributed equipment fleets.